We’ll hear no complaints about the quality of the candidates to succeed Rob O’Leary as Cape & Islands state senator. Jim Crocker and Dan Wolf have long and distinguished records of service, and Cape Cod would do well to be represented by either on Beacon Hill.

Crocker represents a long line of Cape Codders who absorbed a sense of duty toward this place and its people as they grew up here. A success in business and at the ballot box, the Osterville town councilor speaks with a voice that carries echoes of generations who have spoken up and been counted.

Wolf, as so many of us, is a washashore. He has worked to reshape the Cape to preserve what drew him here and extend to more of us the opportunities he enjoyed.

Both men enjoy a healthy fund of skepticism that leads them to think before acting. Crocker won’t sign on to something that sounds good unless he’s convinced that it really is good in the long run. Wolf took things so far that he became skeptical of his own position on Cape Wind, ultimately changing, a la Walter Cronkite, from foe to friend, sort of. (We think he’s wrong on that count, but that’s an argument for another day).

But there are varieties of skepticism, and on balance we believe that Wolf’s progressive and creative version will work better in the Legislature than Crocker’s more cautious variety.

Some sage called the states the “laboratories” of the country. It’s here that new approaches to old problems can be test-driven and eventually adopted nationwide.

One thinks of O’Leary’s ocean management legislation, first in the nation. That’s the kind of progressive thinking that Cape Cod, the commonwealth, and maybe even the nation need in the Cape & Islands seat.

With thanks to Crocker for his continuing service on the town council and the Centerville- Osterville-Marstons Mills prudential committee, we urge voters to send Wolf to Boston to provide the creative leadership for which he’s known in the Cape’s business, government, and nonprofit communities.